花月杀手

评分：

10.0 力荐

原名：Killers of the Flower Moon又名：花开之月的杀手

分类：剧情 / 爱情 / 悬疑 / 历史 / 犯罪 / 西部 / 地区：美国年份：2023

简介：印第安人的一支欧塞奇族，从祖先的土地上被驱逐到了美国俄克拉何马州一块贫瘠之地，谁

查看详情

更新时间:2024-02-04

花月杀手影评：[Film Review] Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

It takes a maestro like Scorsese to fearlessly expose the human evil behind the true story about a series of murders of wealthy Osage people took place in Osage County, Oklahoma in the early 1920s, after big oil deposits were discovered beneath their land. Scorsese’s Teflon cachet helps him obviate from being caviled as another “white male” director tackling the racially sensitive issues and warrants that his film will not be subjected to a “white savior” perspective but narrativizes the whole enchilada from within, viz. the mix-raced couple, white man Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and his Indian wife Mollie (Gladstone), both are caught in the eye of the storm as a perpetrator and a victim, respectively.

Scorsese doesn’t wince from re-enacting the harrowing and heinous crimes wantonly exacted to the Native Americans at the hand of land-grabbing, money-grubbing lighter-skinned latecomers. The sheer enormity of these cold-hearted murders and attacks organized by the wire-puller, De Niro’s William “King” Hale, Ernest’s uncle and a local political boss, is staggeringly horrific and tectonically whittles away one’s rosy belief in humanity. Yet, De Niro’s impersonation of pure evil feels one-note, Hale is an out-and-out hypocrite and a sanctimonious snake. De Niro is loud but monotonously showboating, without exuding a scintilla of the requisite charisma which has facilitated Hale’s ascendancy to the top rung, he turns out more irascibly despicable than evoking a frisson of terror.

With Native American’s displacement and destruction being put into a fine-grained scrutiny, it is of vital significance that Mollie’s perspective isn’t overmatched, although her actions are more disposed to be in constant mourning (with the successive passing of her mother and three sisters, and later her own child) and bedridden after being poisoned by her husband. Mollie is a victim but also a survivor of such atrocities, Gladstone hits a major milestone by becoming the first Native American nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role in the Oscars, and very likely will nab that golden statuette (has the Academy ever missed a chance to tick the box of inclusivity and pluralism?).

It pains audience to twig Mollie is too fragile a creature to be more actively in the justice-seeking procedure (apart from her trip to Washington, which functions as the key that instigates the investigation from the Bureau of Investigation, the predecessor of FBI). But Gladstone’s stoicism and steeliness, her grief and miraculous stamina, mark Mollie as the backbone of the film, the sole character audience can care and root for. Her minimalistic telegraphing is brilliantly weaponized when the reckoning belatedly arrives, her final scene with DiCaprio is far more resounding than any of De Niro’s thunderous hectoring and hoking.

Most crucially, the film could only penetrate its grave message-y carapace and reach a deeper, spin-tingling resonance if audience would buy Mollie and Ernest’s union is in earnest from Mollie’s part, and in this aspect, Gladstone’s inscrutable guardedness and simmering dignity makes competent bedfellows with DiCaprio’s slightly smarmy, halting and unassuming manners. Mollie isn’t a purblind damsel (and an aging DiCaprio is not exactly an irresistible catch to begin with), she marries Ernest because she truly believes he is a simple-minded, good-hearted guy after some observation which is ruefully against her mother’s warning (the miscegenation is an underdeveloped trope here), she simply cannot imagine the unfathomable nastiness a fellow human can harbor downright out of cupidity.

DiCaprio manages to keep a rein on the good/bad dichotomy with considerable charm and conviction (though it is telling that his marquee days may be over in terms of physique allure), yet Ernest’s behavior still remains irredeemable. Him and Hale are cut from the same cloth and the whole story’s the-pot-calling-the-kettle-black irony doesn’t really strike home. Among its supporting characters of umpteen shady white fellows (many cameos from musicians like Isbell, Simpson, Yorn and Musselwhite) and defiant Osages, Cara Jade Myers’s Anna, Mollie’s eldest sister, a spitfire whose no-nonsense moxie is mostly cruelly snuffed, and Louis Cancelmi’s Kelsie Morriso, an amoral accomplice whose superbly and callously airy comportment betrays the most unsettling revelation of malevolence’s banality are Yours Truly’s pick for plaudits.

Spanning 3 and a half hours, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON retains Scorsese’s integrity and artistry as his cinematic sway and techniques are in full swing. The late Robbie Robertson’s (1943-2023) enchanting, ethnic score is both a potent lament over a tragic past and an invigorating paean to the undimmed tribal spirits; Schoonmaker’s seamless editing is like an invisible hand that pieces together a convoluted puzzle with uncanny efficiency and clarity; Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography is a spectacle of its own lifeline, those transfixing tableaux and blockings and the serpentine kinetic celerity of the camera, all collectively coalesce into a soul-stirring evocation that evil resides in the contiguity, KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON is not just a historic object lesson, its reverberations are no less relevant in this day and age.

referential entries: Scorsese’s SILENCE (2016, 7.8/10), GOODFELLAS (1990, 8.8/10); Kelly Reichardt’s FIRST COW (2019, 8.0/10); Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s THE REVENANT (2015, 8.1/10).